Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I came across Jose Javier Serrano's work today over at the always inspiring This Is That. I typically try to avoid describing someone's work by referencing another's; however, Serrano's images almost immediately struck me as a synthesis between Harry Callahan's Eleanor portraits and Richard Misrach's On The Beach images. Ultimately, the Spanish photographer's sensitivity to light, color and design ignites a satisfying uncanniness in the images.

I would definitely recommend taking a few minutes to check out some of Serrano's other projects. Be warned though, there's 36 of them.

Adam Cruces recently got in touch to share some of his work. Working in a variety of media, including photography, video and installation, Cruces creates art that explores the transitional space between tranquility and anxiety.

I would highly recommend watching his video work, which is simultaneously humorous and jarring. The video below, Michael Jackson Moonwalk, is a wonderful homage to the recently deceased King of Pop. You can see more of his videos here and here.

We have teamed up with the always supportive Andy Adams over at Flak Photo for a feature highlighting 7 photographers from Issue 4 of The Exposure Project Book. It runs weekdays from September 23 - October 1, 2009 and includes photographs by:

For more information on Issue 4, visit the "Books" section of our website. Anyone interested in purchasing a copy of the special edition should act fast, as book and print sales have picked up in recent weeks.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Submissions for the "End of Summer" book giveaway have officially closed. Fall sadly entered our lives 38 minutes ago, which means that it's now time to review all the entries we received. We would like to thank everyone who submitted and look forward to seeing your work!

We will post the winning photograph along with the accompanying interview some time in the near future. Until then, dig out your Autumn sweaters and embrace the change of seasons.

Richard Mosse's series Breach is an investigation of Saddam Hussein's former imperial palaces in their converted state as temporary housing facilities for the U.S. military. The always insightful BLDGBLOG conducted a wonderful interview with Mosse earlier this year regarding his time in Iraq. The excerpt below was taken from their exchange:

BLDGBLOG: The way these structures have been colonized is often amusing and sometimes shocking—the telephones, desks, and instant dormitories that turn an imperial palace into what looks like a suburban office or hospital waiting room. Can you describe some of the spatial details of these soldiers' lives that most struck you?

Mosse: It was extraordinary how some of the palace interiors had been transformed to accommodate the soldiers. Troops scurried beneath vaulted ceilings and glittering faux-crystal chandeliers. Lofty marble columns towered over rat runs between hastily constructed chipboard cubicles. Obama's face beamed out of televisions overlooking the freezers and microwaves of provisional canteen spaces.

Many of the palaces have already been handed back to the Iraqis—but where Americans troops do remain, they live in very cramped conditions, pissing into a hole in the ground and waiting days just to shower. Life is hard on the front line, and it seems more than a little surreal to be ticking off the days in a dictator's pleasure dome.

The most interesting thing about the whole endeavor for me was the very fact that the U.S. had chosen to occupy Saddam's palaces in the first place. If you're trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator, why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they'd done away with. Instead, they made the mistake of repeating history.

This is why I've titled this body of work Breach. "Breach" is a military maneuver in which the walls of a fortification (or palace) are broken through. But breach also carries the sense of replacement—as in, stepping into the breach. The U.S. stepped into the breach that it had created, replacing the very thing that it sought to destroy.

There are other kinds of breach—such as a breach of faith, a breach of confidence, or the breach of a whale rising above water for air. All of these senses were important to me while working on these photographs.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Alexander Binder e-mailed me today to share his first completed video, a haunting and off-putting work entitled pluton/calabi-yau. If any of you are familiar with Binder's photographs, then this piece will feel like a natural and understandable extension of his vision. Enjoy...

Friday, September 18, 2009

"a commentary on America's transitioning identity, as it drifts away from a local mom-and-pop, industry-proud culture and moves toward a more corporately maintained society. The project looks into our country's past heritage, in attempt to identify the seeds that sow our future."

to submit entries for out "End of Summer" book giveaway. Anyone interested in sending over an image or two for consideration needs to do so no later than Monday, September 21st @ 11:59pm. Details below:

"To be considered, we are asking that people submit one characteristically, summer-inspired image. This image can consist of whatever the artist deems most emblematic about the season. It can be an image that you've already made, or one that you create specifically for this challenge. It can be of any size, format and process, so long as it is photographically based.

After reviewing the submissions we will select our favorite summer-tinged photograph and announce a winner. The chosen image will be posted on the blog along with a corresponding interview with the photographer.

Submissions should include the image, artist's name and website URL (if available). Send entries to: ben@theexposureproject.com"

Matthew Porter is someone whose work I've been meaning to post for a while now. A graduate of the Bard/ICP program, Porter's imagery mines a distinctly iconic brand of Americana - one that seems fitting when considering the work of his former teacher Stephen Shore. The interview below, taken from The Morning News, gives some insight into the artist's process:

"In many of the pictures, there’s an affection for wide-open spaces and grandeur, even myths: big skies, flying cars, floating blimps, cowboys. Do you find photography well suited for capturing big ideas?

Overall, I would have to say no. I’ve had to use quite a bit of Photoshop and travel to different parts of the country to make those images. It would be easier if I could make the work from scratch, or appropriate the imagery, but because I’m interested in authoring my own source material, I need access to the subject. Sometimes I feel like photography is not the best medium for the work I’m making, but I’m determined.

The flying cars have garnered a lot of attention. Where did they start for you? Are you still interested in them?

I was inspired by ‘70s road and car chase movies to make something with muscle cars, but I couldn’t get away from a documentary style project. Then I happened to see the end of the Starsky & Hutch remake, where the car freezes in mid-air while lens flares splash over the hood, and I realized that’s what I wanted. Then it became a problem of how to do it on a small budget.

I like them because they represent iconic moments that have very little with telling a story. No one ever talks about how Bullitt is a police procedural, but I see stills from the car chase reproduced all the time; the imagery is vivid enough to remain, and they play directly to the imagination. When I get an opportunity to install work somewhere, I like the flying cars to function the same way, so they should never be shown all together. I’ll probably continue to make them, maybe one every year for a while.

Do you have a special appreciation for how things are made? How they’re constructed? I’m thinking about the portraits of the tools, the wasp nests.

Yes, although I had other aspirations for that work. The pictures of tools and workspaces that you’re talking about were going to be paired with portraits of women singer/songwriters as kind of a testament to the erstwhile connection between folk and rock music and the manufacturing base. Actually, I think I meant the connection to be sweeter than that. I photographed the nests to augment a series of photographs I made of the original Fort Knox in Maine. The fort never saw any action, so it’s a historical landmark without any real historical significance, and in a way emasculated. The nests are the feminine companion pieces—they have this disconcerting hole and they’re actually quite delicate.

What sort of frustrations do you run into? What kind of limits when you’re trying to create?

It’s financially exhausting to continually make work that requires props, travel, and high-end finishing. That’s not to say that my work necessarily requires a lot of money to make, a lot of things are shot hanging from string in my kitchen. The larger frustrations have more to do with how to get what can at times look like very glib, substance-less work exhibited in the right context.Are you a lover or a fighter?

I wish I were living in LA in 1970, writing and recording long, heartfelt works of disillusionment.

What are you working on now?

The new work is tentatively titled “High Lonesome”, and it’s sort of an absurd mash-up between the Hindenburg and the American West. I’m in the process of building some Hindenburg related objects so that I can photograph some details, and I’d like to take another trip out west this spring."

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Mass Art's Fall installment of their "Photography Lecture Series" has shaped up quite nicely. Any photo-lover in the Boston area should do themselves a favor and mark down all of the upcoming lectures on their calendars. They should, across the board, be thoroughly engaging. If you're not a Mass Art student, however, I would highly recommend showing up a little early, as space is limited.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Last Fall I was fortunate enough to see Tim Davis lecture at the Museum School in Boston. It was by far one of the most engaging and spirited talks I've ever seen. Although Davis spoke in length about his entire career, he spent much of lecture discussing the images he made while photographing for a Rome Prize Fellowship. These images coalesced into The New Antquity, a project that examines the historical shift in regard to archeological sites. Davis also currently has an exhibition up right now at Greenberg Van Doren in New York. Details below:

"The more time I spent in Italy, the more interested I became in that forceful shift of attention, and wondered if it could occur outside its ancient sites. I began haunting the periphery of Rome, its modern suburbs and interstitial landscapes, outside the ring road and down highway grades, places that looked more like New Jersey than Napoli. I would march into gypsy camps and factories that made dental inserts. I once crossed two overpasses to photograph a giant glowing sign that said “MOTEL BOOMERANG.” I photographed objects and people and situations and landscapes, scenarios and fragments. Every time I felt that tingle—the one that had accompanied a field of stone fragments rising in my imagination into an ancient temple—I would take a picture. The photographs began to feel vital to my experience. I sensed the camera transforming a part of the culture no one looked at into a set of odd and material monuments. There was a preservative quality to the practice: if the monuments of these suburbs were to be documented, it had better happen now, because they were certain to be gone soon. The suburbs were a ruin in the making.

Many of my pictures did not look particular to Rome, but might have been taken outside of Phoenix or Cairo or Jakarta. The suburbs turn out to be a globalized space, with building materials and construction styles and rubbish (and maybe hopes and dreams) flooding across national borders. The Imperial Romans did the same, shipping marble from Carrara to decorate bathhouses from Tunis to Turkey. This New Antiquity doesn’t come from a centralized authority, but spreads virulently through all fertile capital markets. And its rise and ruin occur quickly, before they can be chronicled.

The idea of a “New Antiquity” colonized not just my time in Rome, but began to make meaning out of other recent areas of inquiry. In 2007 I had traveled to China, photographing in a similar manner but without a particular aim. I had spent years photographing in New York City, walking with my view camera in a shopping cart, making pictures of rubble and junk in parts of the city that were resistant to gentrification. All over the eastern seaboard of the United States, I had accumulated a longstanding set of sad little Vanitas-like found still lives, pictures that were meant to stand in for sadness and loss. The more I sifted through these pictures, taken from the edges of great ancient and modern capitals—in different spirits and for many ostensible “purposes”—the more sense they began to make together."

Graphic Intersections collaborator Michael Marcelle's new project Our Wild Indians is an exploration of Atlantic City. Far from the standard Americana-drenched representations we've become familiar with, Marcelle's investigation of this iconic beach community takes a more abstract and idiosyncratic stance. Buildings shrouded mist, cryptic wall drawings and anonymous beachscapes pervade Old Wild Indians. Things are obscured rather than illuminated. Ultimately, Marcelle ability to render the unremarkable with intriguing strangeness shines through beautifully in this series.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Sales for the "Special Edition" of Issue 4 of The Exposure Project Book have picked up in recent weeks. Anyone interested in purchasing their own copy should act fast, as certain editions are close to selling out (For instance, there is only one more Bradley Peters print left Bradley Peters' edition has sold out). To view the available print editions for the "Special Edition", click the link above.

We would like to thank everyone who has showed support by purchasing a copy of Issue 4. Your support and encouragement are truly invaluable. Also, all of you out there interested in receiving a complimentary copy of the regular edition of the book should send over their most representative summer-inspired image for our "End of Summer" book giveaway.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

I saw one of Kate Steciw's pieces this past Spring at the LUCI curated exhibition (super)natural. Her work, although difficult to categorize, adopts a more fluid or subconscious cohesion - not found in a similarity of subject matter or style, but rather in an overarching equivalence in mood.

Steciw has also put together a pretty amazing weekly e-mail entitled Friday Round-Up, which consists of a variety of insane, hilarious, embarrassing and downright bizarre found images from around the web. Click the link above if you have any doubts.

Monday, September 7, 2009

I picked up a copy of Appropriation the other day - a wonderful collection of writings on the subject published as part of the series Documents of Contemporary Art. Contained within is an excerpt from Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem, which explores the phenomenon of Orientalism in postcolonial European postcard imagery. Focusing largely on photographs of Algerian women, Alloula examines photography as an export of cultural appropriation, racism and Eastern exoticism. Below, Alloula expounds on photography's effectiveness in propagating Orientalist stereotypes:

"It matters little if Orientalistic painting begins to run out of wind or falls into mediocrity. Photography steps in to take up the slack and reactivates the phantasm at its lowest level. The postcard does it one better; it becomes the poor man's phantasm: for a few pennies, display racks full of dreams. The postcard is everywhere, covering all the colonial space, immediately available to the tourist, the soldier, the colonist. It is at once their poetry and their glory captured for the ages; it is also their pseudo-knowledge of the colony. It produces stereotypes in the manner of great seabirds producing guano. It is the fertilizer of the colonial vision.

The postcard is ubiquitous. It can be found not only at the scene of the crime it perpetrates but at a far remove as well. Travel is the essence of the postcard, and expedition is its mode. It is the fragmentary return to the mother country. It straddles two spaces: the one it represents and the one it will reach. It marks out the peregrinations of the tourist, the successive postings of the soldier, the territorial spread of the colonist. It sublimates the spirit of the stop-over and the sense of place; it is an act of unrelenting aggressiveness against sedentariness. In the postcard, there is the suggestion of a complete metaphysics of uprootedness.

It is also a seductive appeal the spirit of adventure and pioneering. In short, the postcard would be a resounding defense of the colonial spirit in picture form. It is the comic strip of colonial morality.

But it is not merely that; it is more. It is the propagation of the phantasm of the harem by means of photography. It is the degraded, and degrading, revival of this phantasm."

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Nearly a year after its initiation, the inaugural installment of Graphic Intersections has been completed. I can honestly say that I haven't worked on something that was more rewarding, inspiring and fun than this project was. We would like to thank everyone who participated and made this project so collaboratively fulfilling, as well as all of you who submitted and showed support last Fall. In case you've forgotten, the participating artists include:

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

NPR recently aired a fascinating piece about Robert Frank's iconic image of the "elevator girl" working in a Miami Beach hotel in the late 1950's. Sharon Collins recently came forward affirming that the young girl, whose distant and melancholic gaze helped fortify Frank's vision of America, is indeed a younger incarnation of herself. The NPR story provided this interesting piece of historical context:

"At the time, her name was Sharon Goldstein, growing up in Miami Beach. At fifteen, she got a summer job as an elevator girl at the Sherry Frontenac Hotel. She says the hotel was always full of tourists, and many of them had cameras. Although she wishes she remembers this particular tourist, she doesn't. But she pieced together what happened by looking at Frank's contact sheet.

"Robert Frank took about four photos of me without a flash in the elevator. I didn't know he was taking them. And then when the elevator emptied of its 'blurred demons,'" she says, "he asked me to turn around and smile at the camera. And I flashed a smile, put my hands on my hips. I hammed it up for about eight or ten frames."